I held my head, which suddenly hurt. The pain seemed concentrated behind my eyes, as it had just before sleep last night.
Another thought came to me then. Perhaps these images were not real, but simply an artifact of my own disturbed senses. No, that couldn’t be, for when I sensed the chair behind me, it had been there. And what did it matter if they were hallucinations? I still had to deal with them. No, I had to accept the visions as accurate representations of gravity.
I tried to gauge the new strength of my gravity-sense. Somehow, not quite knowing how I was doing it, I cast my perceptions outward.
I sensed mountains bulking massively to the east of me, huge shapes that tugged at my attention. At the same time, I was still cognizant of the household items around me. (When you look at a complicated landscape such as a forest, how many distant objects are you holding in your mind simultaneously? A hundred thousand leaves and twigs? A million?) Then my senses seemed deflected upward, off the mountains and into the sky.
The pulsing orbs of the sun and moon were still there, deeper in character somehow, distinctive, as was the Earth beneath me.
But now there were others.
I intuitively recognized Mars and Venus, as being the closest of the new objects in either direction. In some strange fashion, I was deriving such information as closeness and relative mass now from these inner representations.
Beyond Mars hung two titans, Jupiter and Saturn, pouring out their gravitons in ceaseless exuberance, almost alive. I was unable to sense their moons, or anything beyond them.
I don’t know how long I was lost in this spectacle. Clocks were inaccessible to me now, save perhaps by touch. All I know is that I sat entranced for a timeless period, “watching” the majestic gavotte of the planets around the sun, all the while half-conscious of my immediate surroundings.
An insistent knocking at the front door brought me back to myself. I suddenly realized I had neither eaten nor relieved myself since the phone call awakened me earlier. I went somewhat unsteadily to the door, using my new sense to avoid the furniture I would otherwise have tripped on.
“Hello?” Mark called. “Alex, are you in there? Are you okay?”
For the first time I sensed the gravityimage of a person.
Mark~s image was fuzzed by the gravity of the intervening door, but still recognizable. An oddly biomorphic shape, the same unnameable “color” as all the other objects I had so far sensed, he pulsed with an intensity identical to the sun, as if his personal gravity was asserting its kinship with that faraway orb.
“Mark,” I said haltingly, still bemused by his new appearance. “What are you doing here?”
“Just checking up on you. Can I come in?”
Something inside me found the thought of letting this—this alien shape inside my house too repugnant for words. I knew it was Mark, but at the same time I found myself convinced that it was something unhuman.
“No—no, not today, please. Listen, I’m fine. I don’t need anything. You can leave.”
“The experiment, Alex—is it working?”
I laughed rather crazily, I’m afraid. “Oh, yes, it’s working. The results are unambiguous. Element 131 does indeed register gravity. I’m making careful notes of everything.”
“Wonderful. The committee, is sure to christen it after you then.”
Mark’s comments seemed inane, in the light of what I was experiencing. I realized with a start that I hadn’t thought of that formerly all-important motivation for the last couple of days. How foolish it all seemed now…
Mark said goodbye and left.
My bladder felt like bursting, a sensation monentarily more arresting than the display of gravity. I used the toilet, then went to the kitchen, where I hastily ate something.
The image of Mark’s body had made me wonder why I hadn’t sensed my own personal gravity. After a little thought, I aseumed that my brain was somehow filtering out the constant and immediate signals of my own gravitons, just as the constant presence of one’s own nose is eliminated from one’s sight.
Such questions were idle. I had more than enough to occupy my mind.
Returning to the chair that had suddenly become my observation deck to the universe, I dropped into it and cast my mind out, beyond the Earth.
June 19
Haven’t slept for two days now. I can’t fend off the impressions flooding in on me long enough to lose consciousness.
I find I almost don’t want to.
Where can I begin to tell what’s happened in the last two days?
Start with this Earth, perhaps.
My perception of this globe we inhabit is no longer that of a featureless blob. I can now distinguish variations in its mass down to the smaller mountain ranges. Undersea ones are as visible as those on the surface. The topography of this globe—to a certain scale—is now always present in my mind.
Closer to home, I can sense snaller masses for miles around. My house and its contents are a ghostly schematic. Passing people and cars on the street wander in and out of focus. Nearby cities are concentrations of weight.
All of this stimuli might be manageable, in terms of organizing them in my mind, were it not for the simultaneous flood of data from the rest of the universe.
I am swamped with the weight of our cosmos.
I can now perceive every object of sizeable mass in our solar system. Asteroids of a certain size, moons, the very rings around planets. Speaking of planets—I can now confirm that there is indeed a tenth one. Its gravity perturbs my altered vision as surely as it does the orbit of Neptune. I can sense the dark mass swimming at the end of its long, long sun-tether, not quite as far out as the Oort Cloud.
Some of the topography of our own moon is also visible to me.
If this is all a hallucination, it is incredibly detailed and consistent.
My mind no longer stops at the limits of our solar system, however.
For the past forty-eight hours, I have probed and pushed and almost inadvertantly strengthened my new senses, until I can now pick up signals from lightyears away.
They say there are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.
I swear I can sense each one.
Oh, not all are individuals. The signals pile up and interfere constructively and destructively with each other, merging, losing their individuality. Still, I believe that somewhere in the welter of the gravitons flooding in on my retinas and stimulating my brain are representatives of every kind of sun.
Pulsars, white dwarfs, black holes, neutron stars, binary systems, cepheid variables, giants off the main sequence—all are tugging at my perceptions, every minute, fron every direction, below my feet as well as above.
The tugging. The awful pulling—that’s what makes this new sense so devastatingly demanding. Vision has never really been characterized—at least to me—by any notion of weight or compulsion, despite the metaphor of being “pulled” by a sight. But this alteration to my eyes has left me with an awful awareness of how we are daily impinged on by gravity.
Of course, objectively speaking, nothing has changed. All my life, this rain of gravity has been pouring down on me, without my taking any notice of it. But now, the ability to “see” it has made me hypersensitive to it.
I feel as if my whole body is being drawn by a team of competing horses in a thousand different directions, as if the universe is attempting to rend me atom from atom. The worst kind of migraine that fades in and out.
I know this is all psychological.
Still, I can’t make it go away.
I don’t know what to do. One minute, holding my head and fighting back tears of pain, I’m praying that as the chiltonium decays, the effect will disappear. The next minute, headache fading, I’m enraptured by the vision of the universe held together by innumerable skeins of gravitons.
Since there’s nothing I can do to rid myself of the talent, I suppose I must utilize it to the fullest.
I will try to see if I can extend m
y new vision beyond our galaxy.
June 20
No luck yet. I am confident that there are gravitic signals from other galaxies hidden in the mix that I just have not learned yet to separate out. Will keep trying.
Later. Completely exhausted, I managed to drop off for a spell. Woke again to the phone, but couldn’t summon up the energy to get out of bed and answer it. Must have been Karla or Mark. I hope they don’t come over to interfere. I feel I’m on the verge of a breakthrough.
Suppose I really should eat something.…
June 23
It happened today.
I feel like the monk in that ancient woodout, sticking his head through the earthly sphere and glimpsing the hidden machinery of the cosmos.
I can now see other galaxies as compact smudges of gravity. Am able to make out the groupings and supergroupings that they form, patterns of abstract splendor, forming luminous bubbles in the foamy universe, which is revealed to be more vacancy than substance.
I believe the objects I detect at the extreme edge of my sensitivity are quasars, those dwellers at the edge of the cosmos, sixteen billion lightyears away.
I feel like a juggler, holding aloft the entire revolving universe in my mind.
I forced myself to eat something after the triumph, in order to go on.
There’s something more, you see. Something I haven’t quite gotten a handle on yet. It appears to be a kind of modulated pulse of gravity, emanating from a distinct direction.
I have to concentrate on this…
June 24
Someone knocking on my door. I told them to go away. Afraid now my powers will disappear before I solve this last mystery…
June 25
Convinced I have the answer to the origin of the modulated pulse.
It’s an artifact of intelligence.
Some civilization much further advanced than ours is communicating with its peers elsewhere, employing artificial gravity waves.
This signal is all I concentrate on now.
The more I study it, the more I seem to—understand it. I appear to be apprehending it on some cellular level.
What the message is, I cannot put into words.
But my headaches are gone.
June 26
Immense biological changes going on within me. The signal is promoting them, I’m certain. Wish I could see a mirror. Haven’t eaten or had anything to drink in three days, but feel fine. Delusion of a dying man? Can’t be sure of anything anymore.
June 27
Couldn’t move now if I wished to. Luckily, recorder is by the bed, and voice-activated.
June 28
No diminishment in my perceptual powers, although the chiltonium should be exhausted by now. Understand the signal completely, but cannot put it into human speech.
June 29
The people behind the signal are talking to me down the line of gravitons, calling me to them. They’re incredibly ancient, yet we’re somehow related, as I know from their ability to subvert my biological programming. Their motives are incomprehensible, neither good nor evil. Above all that. Felt an overwhelming urge to heed their invitation. How could I go back to my old life anyway?
June 30
Won~t be able to talk much longer. Have decided to take their invitation, and fall down the well of stars. These people are masters of the universal attractive force. They assure me that my new body—with its altered integument and organs—will respond to their pull, and be able to survive the trip. Goodbye Mark. Karla, goodbye.
Gravity calls.
REDSKINS OF THE BADLANDS
1.
The Skin She’s Into
Now Ruy Lambeth had to shed his skin. Painless and quick, the monthly practice was mandated by his employer, UNESCO, for two reasons.
The skin, a ruggedized Nuvaderm-Allheal Utility model which remained the property of UNESCO, had to be regularly upgraded, downloaded and generally tweaked back at the Fraunhofer-Chesson factory in Durham. A complete turnaround took five business days, including FedEx overnight transit time each way.
But scheduled maintenance was not the total story. Going skinless for that short stint every month—reasserting his baseline humanity—was deemed necessary to stop Ruy from deserting civilization.
Such was the understated but generally acknowledged important second reason for molting.
Too many skinned individuals had gone dingo, vanishing into the remaining wilderness spaces: the jungles or deserts, mountains or forests or oceans of the world. The practice was called “simaking.”
Such desertion generally constituted grand theft at the very least, with the traitorous and selfish individual absconding with a piece of corporate a-life worth tens of thousands of dollars. And while there were no laws against an individual choosing to abandon civilization and all its duties, the authorities invested in the maintenance of same could not allow the bad example set by such selfish slackers to go viral.
And so Ruy Lambeth made ready to unzip.
The manufactured skin that covered him seamlessly from neck to wrists to ankles sported, with astonishing realism, the buff-and-fawn maculated pattern of giraffe hide. An exceptionally tall and skinny fellow, with long neck and prominent Adam’s apple that had been the bane of his high-school dating years, Ruy amused himself by programming the skin’s densely arrayed chromatophores to display such a self-mocking design. Threaded with epidermal electronics, the skin and its many living components communicated with its owner via a fine-meshed silver hairnet supporting pinpoint transcranial magnetic induction übertoothed into the skin’s squishy wireless card. Ruy’s thinking cap.
Now Ruy mentally transmitted the signal to shed.
A row of sartorized fibroblasts down the dorsal and ventral midline of the skin went into uptake mode and began unstitching intercellular glycoproteins along a defined boundary. Beginning at the neck, the skin split in a clean dry wound down front and back. At the same time, the skin began to retract its slim extensions from inside Ruy’s anus, producing a mildly intrusive yet not wholly unpleasant sensation.
After half a minute, the skin had separated into two symmetrical segments, but remained pasted to Ruy’s own flesh. Now he silently ordered the organism—possessed of as much processing power as a couple of old-fashioned servers, but no real turingosity—to take offline its sensory and metabolic interfaces, millions of microvilli lining the skin’s inner surface.
That procedure accomplished, the skin was ready to be rolled off like two halves of the bilaterally cut wetsuit it resembled, although it was thinner than the standard neoprene swimwear. Moving nimbly, but nonetheless resembling a drunken crane performing ballet, Ruy accomplished the last part of the task with practiced ease.
Ruy stood naked, the shed artificial integument on the floor. It pulsed slightly with residual peristaltics.
Although he had been wearing the Nuvaderm skin for weeks in the field, his own skin showed normal hairiness, moisture, tone and color, healthy and unmarred by its seclusion from direct contact with the environment. None of the slime or pastiness obtained that an untutored newbie might have imagined. When worn, Ruy’s second skin had maintained his baseline epidermis in as fine a condition as that of any hearty, sun-kissed nudist. Finer, in fact, since it also ate any incipient melanomas and farmed a perfect microbiome.
Ruy bent to the smartcarpeted floor of his Toronto apartment and gently retrieved each half of his skin, placing them into a pre-addressed homeostatic mailing capsule that sealed with a hiss of activation. Then he dressed in casual summer-weight clothes and hurried downstairs. He entrusted the capsule to the concierge. The five days without his skin would hardly pass fast enough.
Outside on King Street West, Ruy felt strangely naked and unprotected, limited in his sensory abilities. The sensation of mild October breezes on his bare arms—a balmy twenty-two Celsius Greenhouse degrees today—was not precisely identical to what he would have felt wearing the Nuvaderm integument. His second skin mediate
d the environment with hi-res accuracy, but featured what Ruy thought of as an ineffably different “flavor” from his baseline perceptions. Over time, that strange-flavor sensory input came to feel like the norm.
Oh, well, this vague unease and avidity just confirmed the wisdom of UNESCO’s shedding policy.
Ruy picked up his pace. If he were speedy, he could just manage to have his hair styled in time for his date tonight. Three weeks in the Alberta Badlands had left it looking like a hayrick.
He reached up to smooth the unruly crop, and found himself still wearing his thinking cap. He snatched it off and compressed its few ounces to a small mass and pocketed it.
Dazzle, the gamin stylist at Redd Hair Studio, did her usual stupendous job, making even the gangling Ruy look somewhat dapper. Back home he showered (although having just deskinned he was clean as a kitten), dressed in nicer evening clothes, and was just chilling a bottle of Picpoul de Pinet when the concierge announced Maritza Manzur.
Ruy hastened to his apartment door and opened it just as his stylish girlfriend stepped off the elevator.
With a face from some luminous Old Master Flemish painting, Maritza was a Polish-born high-fashion model. Tweaked in the womb, she sported impeccably curved legs fully ten percent longer than the baseline proportions would have predicted for her six feet and two inches of height. Her waist-to-hip ratio was a perfect 0.7. Her proudly unsupported breasts cantilevered out in seeming defiance of gravity. Ringleted honeyed hair exuded musk from onboard cervoid glands under her scalp.
Ruy had met Maritza at the Wieliczka Salt Mines in her native land. UNESCO had been throwing a gala rededication party for that particular World Heritage Site after the repair of some earthquake damage, and as a top WH field agent, Ruy had been invited. (At the time he had been stationed in Europe.) The unlikely pair had first gravitated toward each other as the tallest people at the party. Then, lubricated by excessive amounts of Reykjavik champagne, they found they had much in common. A sloppy and spontaneous makeout session down in the dry bowels of the mine, behind vintage steampunkish machinery, sealed their relationship.
The Paul Di Filippo Megapack Page 26